We discovered that we both liked hiking in the woods, old movies-Charlie Chan and The Falcon and Bogart and Peter Lorre and Lloyd Nolan-brandy old-fashioneds, football, and good soul jazz. We disliked parking meters, junk mail, the drug culture, peanut butter, and the travesties of war. We touched on religion and politics just long enough to determine that our ideas were similar on one and dissimilar on the other.
We talked and we talked, open and natural, like old friends, like new lovers, and I forgot for a little while about Roy Sands and poor Elaine Kavanaugh and all the ugliness and suspected ugliness that had touched my life in the past week. All at once, then, it was midnight and they were about to close up. We asked each other where the time had gone, the way you do, and I paid the check and then I drove her directly back to 19th Avenue, parking in front of her car a half block from Saxon’s.
We sat there on the darkened street. I said, because it had to be said, ‘Cheryl, will you do me a favor?’
‘Yes, if I can.’
‘Don’t mention that you saw me tonight. To your brother, or to anyone.’
‘Why?’
‘My reasons are complicated and not exactly explainable just now. I’ll tell you about them a little later. Okay?’
‘Well… of course, if it’s what you want.’
‘Thanks, honey.’
She turned her face close to mine at the endearment, and her eyes were pools of deep blackness with the faintest traces of light deep at their centers-and I kissed her. She did not pull away and her lips parted slightly under mine, warm and soft and sweet, and I could feel her shudder with inner emotion as I held her shoulders lightly in my hands. I drew back finally, looking at her, wanting her, needing her, sensing the same feelings inside her own body, but this was not the time, the time was perhaps soon and we both knew that, I think, we both were unable to deny that, but it was not just yet.
‘Thank you,’ she said in a soft, liquid whisper, ‘thank you for a lovely evening.’
‘Are you working Saturday night?’
‘No-the day shift.’
‘Can I see you then? I have to go away again, but I should be back by Saturday.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She touched my hand and we said good night, and then she was out of the car and walking quickly to her own. I sat watching her until she had driven off, until her taillights had vanished around the corner on 19th Avenue, before starting my own car.
The taste and the touch and the scent of her stayed with me all the way back to my apartment.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Roxbury was a small town like a thousand, five thousand other small towns spread across the United States-a little more rustic, perhaps, because of its location, but otherwise predictably conventional. It was situated in the thickly wooden foothills of the Klamath Mountains, east and a little south of Eureka; there was a single street bisecting it into equal halves and extending for three blocks, and that was called Main Street and had everything on it that you would expect to find on Main Street, U.S.A. The village looked quiet and sleepy, and the towering giants of the Redwood Empire, which ringed it majestically, gave it an atmosphere of bucolic tranquillity.
I got in there a few minutes past two on Friday afternoon, and it was cool and cloudy, the countryside lushly green and water-jeweled from a recent rain. I had been on the road for something like six hours, including a brief stop in Ukiah for lunch, and I was tired and cramped as I drove along Main Street. The car had not overheated on the drive, but a rattling sound had developed somewhere, in a location I could not pinpoint. It failed to surprise me much.
At the far edge of town, I found a motel called the Redwood Lodge. It had eight cabins set into a rough horseshoe shape, with number one and number eight at the points of the shoe; they were spaced far apart and partially hidden from one another by redwoods and heavy forest growth. In the near-center of the shoe was a large office-and-residence, of the same design as the cabins and fronted with a jungle of ferns.
I stopped in, and a guy who looked a little like Frank Lovejoy rented me number five for eight dollars a night; I was his first customer all week, he said, things were pretty slow this time of year, big rain and all keeps the people away from the scenic areas. He took me out to the cabin personally; it was two rooms and a shower bath, with beamed ceilings and a false fireplace and mountain-cabin furnishings. I asked the guy how you got to Coachman Road, and he told me and wished me a pleasant stay and left me to my own devices.
I changed into a pair of slacks and a light jacket, and got back into the car and continued east and found Coachman Road without difficulty. It was a narrow, humped lane winding upward through heavy copse of redwood and pine, paralleling a small stream swollen by the winter rains. I went about a mile, and a post mailbox appeared to the left; you could just make out the numerals 2619 on the side of it. Beyond the box, an open gate gave on a sideless wooden platform spanning the creek. On the opposite bank a clearing had been cut in the trees and there was a white frame house on it, and a small barn, and a bare front yard containing a Dodge pickup half as old as I was and the bones of a couple of mid-Depression Fords. The hood on the pickup was raised, and a big guy dressed in blue coveralls had his head inside the engine compartment. He pulled it out when the loose boards of the platform protested the weight of my car, and watched me drive up and park on one side of where he was.
I got out and went over to the Dodge. There was an old, battered toolbox open on the ground by the front fender, and beside it, on a piece of grease-marked canvas, were the components of a two-barrel carburetor. The cool, crisp air smelled of conifers and damp vegetation and oil and machinery corrosion.
The guy was about forty, and he had a face like a rubber mask-or a dead man. The lips were thick and bluish-red, the skin had the look and consistency of dried tallow, the eyes were black pouched pits filled with vacuousness. He had thick, muscle-bunched shoulders and hands like the jaws of a scoop shovel. He was watching me curiously, neither friendly nor unfriendly, those empty, bottomless eyes as immobile as a snake’s.
I put a smile on for him. ‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Howdy,’ ponderously, atonally.
‘Is this the Emery place?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you Mr. Emery? Daniel Emery?’
‘No, Mr. Emery he went into Eureka today.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘My name’s Holly. I work for Mr. Emery.’
‘Well, I’m glad to meet you, Holly.’
‘Mrs. Emery, she’s up at the house if you want to see her.’
‘I’ll do that, thanks.’
‘Sure,’ Holly said.
He turned, dismissing me, and got his head inside the engine compartment of the pickup again. I watched him working in there with a box-head wrench for a moment, and then I moved away and went toward the white frame house.
It was a shambling old structure with dull green shutters and a peaked roof and starched chintz curtains in the windows. There was a vegetable garden along one side, and some thin-vined climbing roses clinging like ivy to a trellis built against the right front wall. As I approached, the front door opened and a woman stepped out a few paces, staring at me.
She was very thin, very gaunt, with gray hair that seemed to grow in tufts on a sunken, colorless skull. A crooked witchlike nose protruded from the center of an angular face; above it were two small, lashless eyes with all the color long since faded out of them, and below were bloodless, almost nonexistent lips. Her calves and ankles, visible beneath the hem of an old-fashioned black skirt, were like white birch poles interwoven with the ugly blue threading of varicose veins. She wore an old gray sweater buttoned to her throat, and white ankle socks and dusty nurse-fashion oxfords, and she had about her a look of infinite weariness, infinite hardship-the way the pioneer women of the mid 1800’s must have looked after twenty or thirty years of plains life.
She said, ‘Yes? Was there something?’ She had a shrill, querulous voice
, like the cry of a frightened crow.
‘Mrs. Emery?’
‘That’s right. What is it?’
‘I’d like a few words with you, if I may.’
‘About what?’
‘About your daughter-Diane.’
Her head jerked slightly, and her eyes seemed to lift in their sockets, darting, and again I was reminded of a frightened crow. She reached up with her right hand and gathered the material of her sweater tightly at her throat. ‘My daughter’s dead. She died, over in Germany, three months ago.’
‘Yes,’ I said gently. ‘I know.’
‘I don’t have none of her paintings. She never give us none of her paintings, if that’s what you want.’
‘No, that isn’t what I want.’
‘Some people come around here, wanted her paintings, but we never had none of them.’ There was a faintly bitter note in her voice, as if the fact that Diane had not given her mother and father any of her valuable art was as much of an injustice and as much of a tragedy as the girl’s death.
‘I’m not here about any paintings, Mrs. Emery,’ I said.
‘What is it, then?’
‘Do you know a man named Roy Sands?’
She did that lifting, darting thing with her eyes again, and her mouth disappeared completely in an ugly white slash, like a razor cut just before it starts to bleed. ‘That filth,’ she said shrilly. ‘He killed her, he killed my Diane girl.’
I stared at her. ‘What?’
‘He got her in the family way, and she destroyed herself on account of him, God have mercy. Him, that Army man, that filth.’
‘You’re certain he was the father of your daughter’s child?’
‘He said it, he come here and he said he was-coming around here, trying to say he was sorry.’
‘When, Mrs. Emery? When was he here?’
‘Just before Christmas, come spoiling Christmas, come just when Dan and Holly was putting up the little tree. He come and took coffee with us, saying he knew her, he knew our Diane, and then he told us he was the father of her baby and he was sorry, he was sorry they was both dead!’
‘Do you remember what day it was that he was here?’
‘Just before Christmas.’
‘Yes, but what day?’
‘Monday, day after church.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
Mrs. Emery looked at me, blinking, eyes darting. ‘Listen, who are you, mister? What’re you asking questions about him, that Sands, for?’
‘I’m trying to find him,’ I said. ‘He’s disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘Yes, apparently soon after he was here.’
‘You a friend of his, mister?’
‘No, I’ve been-’
‘What you want here, mister?’
‘I told you, Mrs. Emery, I’m trying to find Roy Sands.’
‘I don’t know where he is, I don’t ever want to know where he is, that Army filth. We sent him packing, and he went, too, with his tail down like the dog he is-You listen here, I hope you never find him, I hope the good Lord put him down in hell for what he done to my little girl.’
‘Mrs. Emery-’
‘No, now you get out of here, I don’t want you here.’
‘Please, it’s important that I-’
‘Get out of here!’ she shouted. ‘You get out of here!’
She backed away, still clutching the sweater at her throat, a kind of wildness in her faded eyes now. I stood looking at her, indecisive; then I heard pounding steps behind me and Holly was there, the rubber mask pinched and tight and the vacuous pits radiating molten light in their depths.
‘What’d you do?’ he said. ‘What’d you do to Mrs. Emery?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything to her.’
‘Get out of here!’ the woman screamed at me. ‘Get out of here, go away, you, don’t you come back!’
‘You better do what she says, mister,’ Holly said softly, but his big hands hooked and curled at his waist and I knew that if I tried to linger, to reason with Mrs. Emery, he would jump me. Things could be very bad then, in a lot of ways. It was her property, after all.
I raised my hands, palms outward. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m going.’
‘Go on, then,’ Holly said.
I backed off a couple of steps and turned with the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling. But he did not move from beside her. I walked away, slowly, and got into my car. I looked up at them, then, and they were still standing by the door to the white frame house, both of them looking down at me, this Holly with his jawlike hands still curled and Mrs. Emery still clutching her sweater at her throat.
I swung the car around and went over the platform, thinking: Poor Diane, poor genius. Maybe I can understand why death for you was preferable to coming home…
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
So all right.
My suspicions were confirmed, and it did not make me feel very good that they had been. I hoped that I would not have to tell Elaine Kavanaugh-trusting, loving Elaine Kavanaugh-that her fiancé had been the father of Diane Emery’s child in Kitzingen, Germany, and that it was apparently because of him she had committed suicide by hanging. If I could locate him, I knew I would say nothing to her; what point was there in releasing skeletons, in destroying individually created sainthood, if you could preserve happiness and a kind of love that had a shaky but potentially supportive foundation? Well, I had to find Sands, that was the simple fact of it. The prospect of having to tell Elaine what I knew, of having her drag it out of me as she would surely do, was painfully depressing. It was bad enough to be poking into other people’s lives, but when you had to air their dirty linen in front of them, as the old saying goes, it reaffirmed the grim comment Eberhardt had once made to me when I was still on the force: of all the grim messengers on this earth, a cop is the grimmest-a kind of Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse carrying news of death and tragedy and terror into the homes of those who pay his salary…
I got my mind off that track-some track- and back onto what I now knew of the activities of Roy Sands. He had definitely come here to Roxbury after leaving San Francisco on the nineteenth of last month; and on the twentieth he had visited the Emery farm, presumably for the purpose I had conjectured in Kitzingen: a lingering guilt at having been responsible for Diane’s death, and a slim hope that confession to her parents would give succor to his disturbed soul. But the Emerys had driven him away, offering him no forgiveness, no understanding.
And then?
Well, he had apparently left Roxbury, by one means of transportation or another, and gone directly to Eugene, Oregon, for some as yet unexplained reason. Had he done that the same day he visited the Emerys-Monday? It would not appear so, since he had checked into the Eugene hotel late on the twenty-first, Tuesday, and had sent the wires to Hendryx, Rosmond, and Gilmartin on that same evening.
After that-blank.
If Sands had spent the night of the twentieth here, he would not have had much choice of location; aside from the Redwood Lodge, where I was now staying, I had noticed a small hotel on Main Street and nothing else- although there may have been some kind of accommodations on one of the side streets. I ought to be able, then, to determine, with no problem, whether or not he had spent that particular evening in Roxbury. After that, I would just have to see what developed, what my instincts told me. I had this feeling, a prescience of sorts, that said the answer to the disappearance of Roy Sands was in this village-that the final solution to the whole affair could be had right here, with just a little digging, a little perseverance. There was no foundation for that feeling, and yet it was there and it was demanding.
I drove back to the Redwood Lodge and stopped at the office and talked again to the guy who looked like Frank Lovejoy. His name was Jardine, I discovered, and he was the owner of the motel; when I told him what my job was and asked him about Roy Sands, he was agreeably co-operative.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I
remember him clear enough-Roy Sands. He came in on foot, with just a single suitcase. It was raining a little that day, and he came shuffling down the road looking kind of wet and forlorn. Must have just got off the one o’clock bus from Eureka, I remember thinking at the time. Let’s see, I rented him cabin number three, I think it was. Only stayed the one night.’
‘He was alone?’
‘Oh sure, alone.’
‘Did he say much to you?’
‘Come to think of it, he asked me for Coachman Road. Same as you did a while ago.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Not as I can remember.’
‘What time did he leave the next morning?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ Jardine answered. ‘He was gone, key in the cabin door, when Frances- that’s my old lady-went in at ten.’
‘Then you didn’t see him leave?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t it a little unusual for somebody to check out that way, without turning the key in to you here?’
‘Not if they’ve paid in advance, like he did.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Can you tell me where the bus station is?’
‘Don’t have one, exactly. Greyhounds stop at Vanner’s Emporium, two blocks back on Main.’
‘Is there a police station in Roxbury?’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘Where would I find it?’
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